In love, like life, there are no guarantees. But singles who signed on with a matchmaking service offering connections to other locals say they wound up with dateless, despite paying thousands of dollars up front for the chance to meet other lonely hearts. [More]
romance
White Tablecloth & Bottle Of Wine Turned Couple’s Taco Bell Meal Into Valentine’s Love Feast
By 2.16.16 — Updated: 2.14.17
Depending on your point of view, this is either the classiest Taco Bell meal ever, or a cheapo way of getting out of making a Valentine’s Day dinner reservation. [More]
Couple Celebrates Tasting Their 25,000th Beer Together After 35 Years Of Sipping
By 7.3.14
It’s an admirable feat to stay married for as long as 35 years, but finding the time to taste 25,000 beers together as a couple over that many years? That’s nothing to sneeze at. A Bethesda, MD couple marked that major milestone this week, celebrating the 25,000th beer they’ve sipped together since they started taking notes in 1979. [More]
Company Will Make Fake Facebook Girlfriends
By 3.29.11
Hoping there’s a market of lonely single dudes who wish to project the image of happy domesticity, a company promises to develop pretend girlfriends to post sweet nothings on clients’ walls. [More]
Court Rejects Lawsuit Against Ladies Nights
By 9.6.10
Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a New York lawyer’s claims that “ladies nights” at bars were unconstitutional because they forced men to pay more. The lawyer says he’s going to appeal to the Supreme Court, but he admitted to the New York Daily News that the odds the court will agree to hear his case are “about the same as some pretty young lady paying my way on a date.” [More]
Being Frugal Makes You More Appealing
By 8.23.10
According to a new ING Direct study, the word that most comes to mind when a hypothetical blind date partner is described as frugal is “smart.” Sadly, “sexy” only came to mind about 3.7% of the time, but at least you’ll have more chances: an eHarmony review commissioned by Ron Lieber at the New York Times “found that both men and women were 25 percent more likely to have a potential mate reach out to them if they identified themselves as a saver rather than a spender.” [More]
Special Lovemaking Coffee Can Cause Sudden Drop In Blood Pressure, Lovemaking
By 6.21.10
If you want to be a passionate lover, or at least a noticeably hyper one, of course you should drink a lot of coffee before hitting the sheets. That’s just common sense. But the FDA says that a specially marketed aphrodisiac coffee, Magic Power Coffee, can interfere with prescription drugs and cause a dramatic loss of blood pressure. [More]
How To Improve Your Chances On Dating Websites
By 1.29.10
The blog for OkCupid.com recently looked at over 7,000 profile pictures of men and women on the dating site, and compared various poses with the number of new contacts made each month. If you’re using a dating site you might want to read through their findings and fine-tune your presentation. [More]
Never Embarrass Yourself Trying To Unscrew A Wine Bottle Again
By 12.4.09
The horrible thing about screw-cap bottles of wine, says the website butterflywineopener.com, is that they suck all the romance out of bottle opening. But lucky you! “The Butterflyâ„¢ solves that by flawlessly and expediently opening any screw cap bottle while retaining the elegance of traditional wine service.” [More]
Three Tips To Keep The Recession From Depressing Your Relationship
By 3.7.09
Money can ruin relationships, but by talking honestly about finances with your significant other, you just might emerge from this depressing recession as a couple. Even if your finances are deteriorating, there are a few ways to keep your money problems from rotting your relationship.
How To Do Valentine's Day On The Cheap
By 2.6.09
Next Saturday is Valentine’s Day, and with the economy in the tanker many people are looking for celebrating the day of love without spending a fortune. Fortunately Trent at The Simple Dollar has several good suggestions for celebrating cupid’s day on the cheap. Here are some of our favorites:
50 Ways To Be Cheaply Romantic
By 6.4.07
You know us, we’re a bunch of cheapskates. That’s why we were delighted to find that Zen Habits had compiled a list of 50 ways to be cheaply romantic. Now not only do we get to be cheap, we can be lazy, too.
25 Most Expensive Cities for a First Date
By 2.9.07
We tallied the average costs of some key elements of a first date: alcohol (specifically, a 1.5 liter bottle of Livingston Cellars, Gallo Chablis or Chenin Blanc wine), food (a 11- to 12-inch pizza from Pizza Hut), entertainment (an evening movie ticket), grooming (a barbershop visit), suiting up (a dry-cleaning bill) and transportation (price per gallon of gasoline). All categories were weighted equally (though price differences in barbershop visits and dry cleaning tended to be greater than those in gas and pizza). Finally–call us old-fashioned–we assumed that the guy pays, hence the barbershop visit instead of a trip to the beauty salon.
Gallo and Pizza Hut? Awesome. We guess that saves money by ensuring that there will not be a second date.
Gay Kissing Threat on American Airlines Flight 45!
By 9.20.06
Weave a circle around you thrice and shut your eyes with holy dread. Those gay guys in the row ahead of you are kissing on the airplane!
AirTroductions: Fuck Away Your In-Flight
By 8.11.06
Yesterday’s foiled terrorist plot to blow up nine jets led to some truly astonishing security measures. With those precautions come larger questions: is it more important to keep 100% of the people 100% safe 100% of the time by forcing them to give up their comforts, their smallest, most casual freedoms? Or is it worth the occasional atrocity to not live in a culture of fear — the terrorists only real victory?
Shockingly, E-Harmony Found Electronic, Harmonious
By 7.11.06
We’ve ragged on E-Harmony, the online dating service accused of having a vaguely creepy religious aura, and several months ago, we were plucking e-Harmony’s harp pretty hard.
Confessions of a Former eHarmony Worker
By 3.31.06
An ex eHarmony.com customer service rep and atheist wrote in. She reveals more about the matchmaking site’s inner workings, including the old guy who sat behind her with a bible on her desk.
Freaks, Geeks And Aspergers: “Don’t Tell Women They Look Fat.”
By 3.29.06
Are you a highly functioning autistic with severely impaired social skills? Yeah, so are we. And, like many of our fellow Aspergerians, we’ve often taken time out from building Rube-Goldberg-like fusion reactors in our Mom’s basement to lament our poor success rate with the ladies. Even for the normal man, saying the right thing to a woman is a game of Russian Roulette, only instead of a bullet in the face, you find your testicles under heel to a grinding stiletto. But what if you can never manage to say the right thing?
